Summer Book Club Days

This summer, I tried to do a few themed days that where we read books, watched videos, did actives, and ate snacks that all centered around a particular theme. They were nothing fancy, but very fun and felt special to the kids! I got this idea from Andrea at Momfessionals who has done the cutest "family book club" days for her kids over the year, and I hope that we will only improve ours as the kids get older!

The first day we had was about berries and I hardly took any pictures, but trust me, it was fun. 😂 We read "Blueberries for Sal", "The Blueberry Pie Elf", and "Jamberry", and then we baked strawberry scones. Henry and Claire did a blueberry fingerprint craft, and we also made strawberry handprints that turned out really cute. I would have loved to go blueberry picking, but it didn't happen this year! 

 

 

 

The next month we did a day about colors. We started the day by watching videos of how crayons are made, which we all thought was really cool, and then we read "The Day the Crayons Quit". We don't own "The Day the Crayons Came Home", so we found it being read on YouTube and the kids LOVED it. They actually watched it several times because the voices and effects were so funny. We also read "Lily Pig's Book of Colors" and "Oh Were They Ever Happy". The scones were such a hit last time that I made some chocolate chip scones for breakfast and then topped them with colorful sprinkles. 

 

Henry did a crayon dot-to-dot and Claire did a crayon coloring page. We practiced sounding out each color name and finding the correct colored crayon. I also printed off a picture for the kids to color in their own silly way, just like Duncan does in "The Day the Crayons Quit". 

 

 

Late on, we cleaned out broken crayons and crayons with missing papers and broke them up to melt our own heart crayons. We did hearts because they were the only silicone molds I had, but I'd love to do this with letter molds one day. 

 

A few minutes in the oven, and voila! 

Lastly, as a nod to "Oh Were They Ever Happy", I printed pictures of a house and we used water colors to paint them like the children in the book paint their house. Claire mostly muddied her paint with lots of colors, but I think Henry's especially turned out so cute! 

Our last special day before school started back in August was ice cream themed! We ate ice cream for breakfast and watched YouTube videos from the Blue Bell Factory. We (attempted) to invent and draw our own ice cream flavors (this was really too advanced for my kids 😂) and we made ice cream cones craft using cupcake liners for our scoops of ice cream. 

Nothin' like ice cream with eggs. 😂 

 

 

  

Next we tried a little science experiment where we tried to turn ice cream cones into volcanoes. They didn't erupt like I was hoping, but the kids still liked to watch the baking soda and vinegar react. 

 

It just came out of the bottom of the cone instead of the top. 😉

While George napped in the morning, I got out the rice bin for Henry and Claire and they used ice cream scoops and ice cream cones to play. They really enjoyed this and spent a good bit of time on it. 

Our final activity was making our own ice cream in a bag. This did work, but was extremely messy (our bags of ice kept leaking and then one popped open and dumped water everywhere) and the ice cream recipe we made wasn't that good. But the kids still thought it was fun and exciting! They did have to go put mittens on halfway through to keep their hands from freezing. 😂

That's it for our summer book club days! We had a lot of fun and I'm excited to continue this next summer. :)